snow crash comes to life

I don't know how many of you follow Worlds of Warcraft at all, I stopped playing because it was sucking my life away, but there's something really interesting happening in there right now.

A plague.

Turns out that there was a certain mission where the boss you had to fight could infect people with a plague that was contagious. It was all supposed to be self-contained in the dungeon. However, some people left the dungeon and started infecting people in towns. The damn virus can even spread to NPCs, which heal quickly enough to not die from it, but are able to pass it on to other people.

From a forum I read tonight:

"Almost every single NPC Horde side has the "Corrupted Blood" effect BUT is auto healing the damage - so the effect isn't ever going away. It just spreads indefinitely between a pack of standing NPCs. People keep bagging up the effect on their pet then spreading it around to other cities players and NPCs who then quickly spread it to others. Next thing you know NPC's from an entire town are permanently infected and everyone in the town is dead or dieing. Now every single town has it!"

Man, what a trip. A real plague, ravaging an online world. This has been around for a few days now, and it's apparently still rampant and killing people left and right. It's like high speed AIDS, online. Just the concept alone gives me goosebumps.

Apparently your pet can contract the disease, and then you can dismiss the pet, and the next time you create your pet, it still has it. Which means this opens the avenue for genuine online terrorism. You can go to "safe" areas, spawn an infected pet, and kill dozens or hundreds of people. It almost makes me wish I still had an account so I could go witness the chaos.